This year PODC has done 10 podcasts on papers that will be appearing in the upcoming conference. There are several minute interviews with an author of each paper. The interviews I’ve listened to are very well-done, although definitely geared to a technical audience. Valerie King does a nice interview on our own upcoming paper “Conflict on a Communication Channel”.

The Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS) is one of the handful of systems venues I try to keep tabs on. Somehow the papers there seem more accessible to a theoretician compared with other systems conferences. There also seems to be more of a tolerance for “pie in the sky” type ideas.